The laptops, workstations and servers that we have at home are pets. Large organizations that employ similar units by the hundreds or thousands need to deploy these resources as cattle, not pets.
Deployment is not realistically complete until successful system configuration has been verified. Unlike performance testing, which verifies that applications are meeting throughput and processing requirements, deployment testing verifies that deployed components are present in storage and services are present in memory with the expected configurations.
Continuing deployment presents a variety of special problems beyond initial deployment, including upgrade management and regression testing.
An opportunity arises for developing flexible tools for deployment testing and verification that can handle both initial deployment of the herds of cattle and ongoing deployment of improvements and upgrades to the herds. These tools are foundational building blocks for autonomous global data centers. Infrastructure delivery automation and improved user experience may result.